Los Troncos Restaurant

These photos were part of a Feb. 19, 1967 Texas Magazine article/pictorial about Los Troncos.

It was a restaurant inside a treehouse. Or a treehouse inside a restaurant.

Whatever you consider it, when Los Troncos Restaurant opened in the Montrose area in the 1960s it must have been a unique dining experience.

Houston Post columnist George Fuermann thought so. He said the interior could have been designed by a “disciple of Charles Addams and M.C. Escher.”

One enters, at 1516 Westheimer, through a narrow hall after passing a waterfall fountain, 12 feet tall and made of 23 tons of stone, built by [owner] Jack [Sears]. The room you enter, if you can call it a room, has a ceiling 21 feet above the floor. Entering for the first time is a mute experience; one thinks of little to say.

Rising around you are 19 tree houses, each built on an actual tree trunk, the largest of which is of red oak and weighs 5 1/2 tons. Call every table a private room, all reached by one of two narrow stairs.

Working on weekends and in their spare time, it took about three years for Jack and his brother Victor to put together Los Troncos. The idea for such a restaurant came when Victor was a college student in Mexico City.

“I needed money to stay in school, so I became involved in the restaurant field,” Victor told the Houston Chronicle’s Mary K. Herolz in 1967.

But not everyone was thrilled with the idea of dining on logs. As one 86-year-old woman told the Chronicle in 1969:

“It’s probably great, but I started out my life eating off wooden logs and I don’t want to finish that way.”